AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO ADDRESS THE LABOR SHORTAGE ON MUSHROOM FARMS THROUGH SMART AGRICULTURE

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, domestic growers produced more than 938 million pounds of mushrooms last year with a farm gate value of nearly $1.2 billion (USDA, 2020). Mushroom production is a very labor-intensive process that relies almost exclusively on an immigrant work force to accomplish all aspects of growing. The jobs on mushroom farms are often difficult and are physically demanding, making it difficult to retain and recruit much needed employees. Production for fresh market mushrooms is very labor-intensive and most jobs are still completed manually in the US. According to the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, there is a critical shortage of farm labor in Pennsylvania (which is also true throughout the US). According to a recent study published in the Mushroom News (October 2019) mushrooms farms are short by as much as 20% of the ideal number of workers needed to complete required tasks on their farms. Additionally, at the past three Penn State University/Mushroom Industry annual strategic planning meetings (2018, 2019 and 2021), representatives from the US mushroom industry indicated that labor shortage is the most pressing challenge facing the profitability and survival of their farms. Engineers and scientists have been working for years looking at ways to automate some of the jobs on mushrooms farms, including the development of automated harvesting systems, with many of the technologies recently being developed in Europe. Most of the farms in the US have been in operation for decades and are not designed to allow for the adoption of automated technologies that have recently been gaining acceptance in many European farms. More importantly, the US mushroom market demands a high-quality fresh product that cannot be harvested efficiently using currently available technologies found elsewhere, whereas the European market consists of a higher percentage of mushrooms that are marketed as canned or soup products (not fresh). The long term goals of this project are to address the US mushroom industry labor shortage by: 1) improving manual harvesting speed by adjusting production practices that will allow for easier, and therefore faster, mushroom harvesting, 2) reducing the dependency on manual labor through the development of automated harvesting and packaging machines that will either assist with current labor use or be used in place of manual labor for certain tedious jobs, and 3) assessing the economic impacts of the proposed technologies.